Your teachers are all around you
All that you perceive
All that you experience
All that is given to you or taken from you
All that you love or hate, need or fear
Will teach you
If youre willing to learn
All successful life is
adaptable,
opportunistic,
tenacious,
interconnected
and fecund.
Welcome everyone. I appreciate you all joining me for a little temporal excursion. My voice will be your guide through multiple spaces and times. This will be an exercise in expanding our sense of time, our ancestral empathy, our capacity to live in the future, the past and in our bodies simultaneously. We are a multigenerational organism. You might know history, know the events, the players, the facts, but do we feel history in our guts? Can we connect with the psychoemotional experience of our ancestors, when they were free, when they were enslaved ? How far do you dream? Can you feel liberation in your limbs ? Does it taste familiar? Can you witness the freedom of your descendants as your own? Can you dance with them? Do you respond to the bubbling mantle to shape the world? Or the anxiety that comes with its disfucntion?
This abyss surrounds us everyday. What do you do with the darkness? We live in the heart of a genocidal war-bent empire, run by literal pedophiles prioritizing profit and resource accumulation at the expense of all life on the planet. This is not an isolated incident, but a natural progression to centuries of pillaging and subjugation. This mode of thinking must be understood as part of our humanity, a pattern that we have not yet learned how to address. It is easy to blame another, or throw up our hands in front of systems beyond our control.
But there are other patterns held in our collective capacity. Resistance reverberates in our blood. It sings and dances and demands attention. This darkness is a moment, a painful moment, but we get to shape the humanity that we want. We shape whats possible. That is our mantle as artists, as a community, as a species. We deal in visions; we must expand the collective vision of whats possible. We must situate our awareness in the longest visions of history we can imagine. This expansive time-sense is not meant to be comforting. Change is not comfortable. Yet, change is the only constant. God is change. We shape god.
All successful life is adaptable, opportunistic, tenacious, interconnected and fecund.
A culture that does not honor its ancestral dead
Cannot imagine the future
Cannot place itself in living present
Dreaming is the vehicle of our ecological belonging, dreams belong to life
Dreams and visions need an ecology in which to live and grow
Dreams belong to life
Prescience is a heavy blessing
It demands discipline and healthy detachment
A relinquishing of your desires and discernment of all possibility,
those that bring salvation
Those that bring us harm
Selecting among agonies
Whatever the price for liberation
We will pass through consuming darkness
realities indistinguishable from imaginations
Hungering for absolutes that cannot be
Security does not exist in nature
The abyss remains
Pregnant with everything yet to be
Gentle violence, agonizing possibility
All successful life is adaptable, opportunistic, tenacious, interconnected and fecund.
Some Images by Jonathan Castillo, of artdocchicago.